Great Moments In Conservative Hackery

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.”

Yesterday, 25 senators sent a letter to Hagel demanding information on his foreign funding. Hagel has refused all such requests…

Ben Shapiro has purportedly made several sordid visits to Mickey Kaus’s purported goat farm. Why won’t he address this issue? I DEMAND ANSWERS!

I suppose it goes without saying that “Friends of Hamas” doesn’t exist. What makes this pathetic rather than merely amusing is Rand Paul citing this as a reason to filibuster Hagel. Ah, the World’s Worst Deliberative Body.

Non-existent? Our Ben worked for hours to get a good sounding name on that check to Hagel

Manta

I don’t like Kaus, but wasn’t he *right* when he said that John Edwards had an affair? Did the people that mocked Kaus for being right (for once) apologize to him?

c u n d gulag

We don’t want to start a trend, now, do we?

Then what do we do if Sarah Palin, Bill Kristol, or Dick Morris, is ever righ…
LOL!
Never mind – THAT’LL NEVER HAPPEN!

So, Mickey, we apolog…
Nah, it ain’t worth it.
Even a blind squirrell finds an acorn every once in a whil.
If only Palin, Kristol, and Morris, were squirrel’s, instead of squirelly.

Manta

It’s easy: I pledge that next time I will trust more Kaus’ judgement about a public figure love life (as if I cared…).

swearyanthony

He gleefully spread every sleazy story he could find. He wasn’t right about Edwards, the National Enquirer was – he just posted links to them. How many of his smears on the Clintons were true?

rea

Stopped clock.

Warren Terra

No, he wasn’t right about Edwards – the Enquirer was, and was at the time offering no proof whatsoever. At most, Kaus was right, in this instance, that people should trust the reporting and the veracity of the Enquirer; any judgment about Edwards was based entirely on sentiment. That’s not a display of judgment: it’s a willingness to embrace any smear against Edwards he comes across.

Mind you: I never liked, trusted, or believed Edwards. I’m not claiming generally great judgment here: I was a committed Clark backer in 2004, and I think Clark won one primary and maybe a stuffed animal or two at various state fairs, and he hasn’t covered himself with glory in his later career. I’m just saying that I’m not coming to this as someone who would ever defend Edwards, except against the notion that it was right for Kaus to believe as-yet unfounded rumors about him.

John

I don’t really disagree with this, but it certainly seems a bit unfair that Kaus has become the byword for believing things for which he has no evidence on the basis of the time when he believed something that was true.

MattT

It would be unfair, except for the dozens of times he did the exact same thing where the story turned out to be bogus. He spent a lot of in ’04 pushing a story about Kerry having an affair with an aide that turned out to be complete bullshit. That the goat thing stuck on a story that turned out to be true doesn’t change the fact that he’s a complete hack willing to relay any evidence free story (about a Democrat) based on nothing.

He really should have come up in that worst Senator thread.

John

Again, I don’t think there’s any real substantive unfairness here, because Kaus did push these kinds of stories whether they turned out to be true or not, but there’s certainly irony in the fact that the one that spurred the meme turned out to be true.

And why would Kaus come up in the worst Senator thread? He’s not a Senator now, is he?

MattT

No, I just appreciate every opportunity to bring up his hilarious Senate campaign.

All of my favorite moments of that debate came from the Doughy one, who kept missing the point in the most insanely idiotic ways ranging from that tu quoque to “Some NROers disagree with others!” to, I shit you not, “National Review does so hire new interns!”

Bill Murray

I believe both Reynolds and Goldberg have two hands so they are even-handed by default

I’d reply to your comment, but I’m running on a tight deadline right now.

Hogan

it certainly seems a bit unfair that Kaus has become the byword for believing things for which he has no evidence on the basis of the time when he believed something that was true.

I don’t think that’s the basis for his being such a byword. It’s just the thing that Kaus’s defenders bring up whenever the byword is spoken, so the two have acquired a Pavlovian link.

Scott Lemieux

I don’t like Kaus, but wasn’t he *right* when he said that John Edwards had an affair? Did the people that mocked Kaus for being right (for once) apologize to him?

This is incredibly dumb. When you believe every bad rumor about every major Democrat, obviously you’re occasionally going to be right. That doesn’t mean his assertions about Edwards had any more basis than his similar assertions about Kerry did.

Well, this is certainly good news for Frank Gaffney – getting a mention by Weigel is certainly a step up in class for him.

I also have to give Obama credit on this nomination. Hagel doesn’t make my top 100 for the SoD job . . . but . . . it’s very entertaining to see the conservative piranha chowing on the carcass of one of their own.

Truthiness isn’t just wish or even misdirection, it seems to be a foundational belief system for these morons.

John

You have a top 100 for the Secretary of Defense job, all of whom you would prefer to Hagel?

JoXn

I’m sure there are 100 actual Democrats who are qualified for the SecDef job, and I would prefer any of them to Hagel.

rea

I’d be surprised if you could find 100 Democrats who (a) had the credentials to be a plausible appointment to the position, and (b) are as far left as Hagle on defense-related issues.

JKTHs

Seriously. There’s probably adverse selection in that the Democrats who were qualified would probably be indistinguishable from a 2000s Republican.

Of course, I exaggerated for effect. I’m not sure there are 100 people in the US who are qualified and confirmable for the SoD position. The tightest filter being ‘confirmable.’

I would prefer that there were as many available qualified and confirmable candidates on the Democratic side as there are on the Republican side, but as an outside observer there does not seem to be even the same level of interest among Democrats as there is among Republicans. That’s a real problem. Of course, there is the other problem that the Republicans would agitate endlessly against any Democrat less pliable than Casper Weinberger as SoD.

For example, John Kerry would clearly rather be SoS instead of SoD. It’s not that I want John Kerry, as is, for SoD but that I’d like to see John Kerry, and the like, motivated to be and prepare to be SoD.

Under the current internal Democratic cultural circumstances related to national security issues, defense contracting, and their lack of enthusiasm for actively asserting civilian control of the military Hagel may be the least bad option for Obama, but that’s not necessarily to best option for the country or the Democrats in the long run. I certainly wish Obama had exercised a Democratic option that was equivalent or better than Hagel.

So he can play goat polo. Shapiro is obviously an Al Qaeda operative planted to try to attempt to disrupt American operations and/or get the US engaged in several side wars to help drain off its power.

(Factually probably untrue since I shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity but metaphorically exactly accurate.)

max
[‘At midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do…’]

Manju

Man, at this point “Friends of Hummus” would be reason enough.

c u n d gulag

Maybe he’s supported the Tabouliban?

newsouthzach

I would filibuster any nominee who supported a ban on tabouli.

catclub

I would stuff said nominee with spiced eggplant and sesame paste, then wrap with grape leaves, then leave early for lunch at the mediterranean place down the block.

Well, of course, this is just the sort blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage…. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker’s cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement,… you whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes. You wouldn’t let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards. Well I wouldn’t become a Freemason now if you went down on your lousy stinking knees and begged me.

rea

Ah, but the Illuminati are just a front for the Elders of Zion, or maybe the lizard people . . .

William Burns

Sure, that’s what they want you to think.

MAJeff

Where do the reverse vampires and Rand Corporation fit into all of this?

rea

As fronts for the Gay Agenda

Malaclypse

Yes, but they are Friends of Dorothy, not Friends of Hamas.

rea

Well, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it? Oh, to have a whiteboard on which to draw the connections, like Beck! But, it’s Friends of Hamas, which is a front for the ZOG and Agenda 21 (not to be confused with Area 21, which is where they keep the aliens), which is a front for the Illuminati, which is a front for the Elders of Zion/Lizard People (who front for each other), which is a front for all those reverse vampires in the Rand Corporation, which fronts for the Gay Agenda. Sounds complicated? That’s just what they want you to believe!.

David Hunt

This needs to stop. All of this blathering about false conspiracies is only helping Charles Darwin’s plan to raise Cthulu from his resting place in Ryleth.

Epicurus

Psssst, it’s the Stonecutters! Man, the power of misdirection…

” Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do, we do!

Who keeps Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do, we do!

Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do, we do!

Who robs cavefish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do!
We do!!!”

Q.E.D.

Auguste

Someone, somewhere whispered that there’s “a lot of friends of Hamas, if you know what I mean” – as in, a casual slur against Arab organizations in general – and Shapiro took it and ran with it.

Book it.

Atrios

I actually don’t remember what prompted the kaus/goat linkage, but it wasn’t the Edwards story (as he likes to claim). it came before that.

In 2007, Kaus reported from an anonymous source that candidate John Edwards was having an affair with documentarian Rielle Hunter.[14] Edwards and Hunter both publicly denied this, and Kaus was widely criticized for what amounted to an assumption of guilt.[15] Several bloggers of satiric bent spread intentionally ludicrous and offensive memes concerning Kaus and a supposed predilection for goats,[16] to illustrate that an assumption of guilt can be unfairly hard to disprove. It later turned out that the rumors regarding Edwards were true.

Sources
According to an anonymous source, Mickey Kaus regularly blows goats. Either he fails to deny this strongly enough, in which case his goat blowing proclivities are assuredly true, or his denials will impugn the integrity of my source which makes him a tremendously bad person. And, of course, a goat blower.

Thanks, Slate, for all you’ve done for our discourse. by Atrios at 17:11